Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it.
It is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box.
For users it has sane defaults but provides virtually endless customization and contrary to other desktop environments, user customization is encourage.
For developers, it provides solid libraries to build upon, not like other libraries that are constantly changing and making developers' life harder.
I like kde, it was my main for a over a decade. I had lots of automation, then continual updates kept breaking my kde setup, as functionality was modified for things such as window setup, placement and size, to the teams correct way of functionality of settings should work. Bug fixes I guess.
Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.
I haven't even looked at KDE in many years (I'm not a DE kind of user and just use dwm), but this was true back in the KDE 3 days as well, which I considered much nicer than the contemporary Gnome 2 as well. I never quite understood why Gnome got so much more attention compared to KDE.
Bundling in major distros? (Say, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE(?)) GTK being open-source and quickly adopted by several popular projects? Being initially under the GNU Project? Probably a lot of factors adding together.
I never got over the renaming to Plasma. KDE 3 was great at it's time, but KDE4 / Plasma felt like this bloated, buggy desktop shell seemingly based on QML (not sure, but it looked like it did) with the strange cashew in the corner. Plasma was too configurable, with too many ways to break your setup.
I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and I'm using Mac :-)
I entered the game way after the renaming and it makes a lot of sense to me. KDE is the organization, plasma is that specific project (like Korganizer is the Calendar application).
It makes a lot less sense once you realize that KDE once stood for K Desktop Environment. Trying to retcon this into the name for the organization is just wankery. Plasma is also already the name for the shell, no need to use it for the desktop environment as a whole.
I distinctly remember the KDE 3->4 transition causing a massive revolt and lots of people abandoning KDE. I also remember personally switching from KDE3 to XFCE right around then (although I cannot quite remember exactly why, or what the specific complaints at the time where.). I wonder if we can still be seeing the echos of that backlash as most of the people who left KDE simply never came back.
That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.
Yeah, it's unfortunate they abandoned the really good HCI paradigm in favor of glitzy, interesting problems to work on. KDE4 rollout was a absolute trainwreck.
If it was like me, the KDE4 roll out was done way too haphazardly and wasn't usable for a bunch of releases (like 1.5-2 years? been a while) but a whole bunch of distros adopted it anyway, despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet. That ended up leaving a lot of people with a bad taste for it. the Plasma 5 releases were handled much better. I'm hoping that this latest release fixes the last few bugs with wayland that i kept running into (mostly multimonitor crashes, been tracking the bugs and they claim to have fixed all the ones i remember seeing last, but we'll see). I really want to ditch X11 because there's a noticeable performance increase and better power usage with wayland, by about 4-5 watts on my laptop, when it does run. It's also got better handling of scaling displays which is nice but not as critical for me.
This was what pushed me off kde back in the day and started a multiple year odyssey through all the lesser desktops before ending up on lxde for a while. When lxde started to get left behind as they tried to port to lxqt with limited resources I took kde 5 for a whirl and it was like meeting back up with an old friend and I haven't bothered with anything else since except a brief foray into qtile (I see why people like tiling desktops but I also really think they are not good for anyone with a diverse and ever changing usage/workflow sitaution vs just autobooting kde with a few windows set to autostart in fixed locations).
KDE 4.0 was abysmal, so bad it seemed like deliberate sabotage, and it didn't get much better through 4.2. That's when I gave up on KDE for several years (until about a year or so ago.) Now I'm trying to like it again, all the right pieces seem to be in place, but the constant introduction of new bugs to basic functionality has me questioning why I'm even trying.
> despite the KDE developers saying it wasn't ready yet.
The KDE devs are the ones who decided to call the alpha version 4.0 so I wouldn't put all the blame on the distros here.
I think the problem with KDE 4 was not just but also experimental technologies like Nepomuk (desktop search is great in theory, but an EU research project is probably not the best fit for a production DE), Akonadi (yay let's run a MySQL server on each desktop), Plasma widgets (if you thought one widget set was enough for a DE you thought wrong apparently) and Activities that just didn't provide enough value for the overhead and change that they forced onto the whole system. A more straightforward Qt4 upgrade of KDE 3 would not have been nearly as problematic.
KDE 4.0 was essentially a preview for app developers, where the system had lots of new APIs but applications and desktop functionality built on top of them was still incomplete and not widely tested. Many KDE-based distros nonetheless went with 4.0 as their first KDE4 release.
A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity.
Eventually KDE4 did mature nicely, and the transition to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 was way, way, smoother. There were enough little quirks to notice the transition was happening, but you had more or less harmonious coexistence between KDE4-based apps and KF5-based apps as the developers of KDE apps each migrated theirs over as they saw fit. There was no big moment of widespread breakage or loss of functionality.
Afaict they're taking the same approach to rebasing things on Qt 6. To me it seems like the painful transition between KDE3 and KDE4 is something the developer community learned very well from, but I haven't followed along with any discussions which would really show whether that's the case.
> A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity.
KDE4-based Amarok was its own trainwreck. Released without support for dynamic playlists based on hard filters because FUZZY FILTERS ARE THE FUTURE. And it managed to trash its database twice on my system. It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
> It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
More or less the same for me. I loved Amarok until KDE4, but had to abandon it then. For a few years I used an XMMS2 client I wrote myself, but I grew weary of keeping that updated so I switched to VLC, and later mpv, with playlists loaded from my (custom, but general purpose) file manager.
Linux barely works as it is. I no longer have any interest in debugging my desktop technical problems. Which means my best option is to use the most popular environment so when I do encounter an issue, there is likely to be someone who has already encountered the same issue and reported a solution.
Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-remove-desktop-icons-because world.
I wouldn't call it official, it's a side project run by the community. 'Official' would be something created and supported by Canonical. It's a moot point though since you get the exact same thing by installing Ubuntu without a gui and then doing 'apt install plasma-desktop'.
As a heavy terminal/editor user, I use KDE because it's not too difficult to stop its programs stealing the Control key. It could, and should, be much easier (global) but at least it's possible.
Remap Control_L to Hyper_L in xmodmap, then map Hyper to Control in the terminal emulator. Just an idea, personally I've been working with window managers (most recently Awesome) and not desktop environments exactly due to the keyboard shortcuts that are hard or sometimes impossible to unbind...
I always felt kde was both cluttered and bloated. From memory the initial plasma debut was met with a lot of complaints about stability which tarnished its reputation (though it did improve.)
I was a heavy KDE user until 4 came out. After a massive amount of issues with it (Plasma crashes every few minutes on multiple devices with different hardware), I abandoned KDE and tried it from time to time after seeing comments like yours (roughly once a year or so). I don't know how well it works these days (no desire to spend any more time on trying it out), but IME it worked about as badly as the first 4.x releases until at least whatever version was the latest at the beginning of 2021. It's the same story every time — I install it, login into my desktop, start doing stuff, and get crashes at least once an hour (on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row). Nepomuk crashes, Plasma crashes, kio daemon (or whatever it was called) crashes, this thing and that.
I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway (same story, currently at two years).
> on wildly different hardware, on many releases ten years in a row
Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-specific also).
Eh, maybe. I don't care either way anymore. If it works for you — great, I haven't been so lucky. Everything else has been running smoothly (even gnome), and as a fanatical Linux user I'm usually very careful in my choice of hardware (no nvidia/broadcom/etc).
Plasma crashes are not uncommon even with Intel graphics using a GPU driver in the mainline kernel. I don't see much "everybody's got different hardware" excuse with such a configuration; the GPU (and wifi, etc) drivers being in-kernel is 90% of why I bought this computer.
Autohide panels is something Plasma seems to particularly struggle with. Sometimes the panel will start spazzing out, flickering and neither appearing nor disappearing, before finally crashing completely (and sometimes not coming back until I manually(!) restart plasma shell.)
It was. Now it is a full featured and lightweight DE.
I've switched from Gnome after 15 years to Plasma 5, and I've never been so happy.
Contrary to Gnome, Plasma is lightweight, works out of the box without 3rd party extensions, but yet 3rd party themes and extensions are 1st class citizens.
Its sheer customizability makes customizing it into a real task, though. Every time I start sifting through its settings my eyes begin to glaze over.
It’s gotten better over the years but still has a long way to go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged with a handful of different full configurations that could be easily flipped between to serve as starting points.
And in the thousand options to twiddle, there aren't the options I want.
I'd like a panel that when vertical did not scale the controls on it, just kept them the same size but rearranged them. I want a 4- or 5-column vertical panel with nothing growing or shrinking in size.
I'd like the Xfce option to constrain the Start button to a single line of text+label.
I'd like the Xfce option to set the size and font of the clock.
I rather liked wm2. I would like the option of window title bars on the left or right edge, or even the bottom. Why not?
I liked BeOS' title bars as tabs, not whole width. Can I have those, please?
Then if I stack windows on top of one another, I would like to move the tabs so they don't overlap. Or better still, have them automatically rearrange themselves.
I hate the trend of having no menu bar, just a hamburger menu. Can I disable that globally, please? I want a menu bar in every app, enforced by the desktop. Currently some apps have it, some don't.
I do not want desktop gadgets or widgets or plasmoids or whatever they are called. Not at all, not ever. A tick box to disable them globally might be useful? Maybe integrate with Conky for a desktop status monitor.
I used to have a machine with 3 screens arranged in a line, with the bottom edges level. (Don't have space in the home office, sadly.) If I can't have a working vertical taskbar, can I have one taskbar across the bottom of 2 or 3 screens, please? KDE 3 could do that no problem.
> Plasma is the best modern desktop environment for Linux and yet people barely talk about it.
It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5 million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of the most significant events for the Linux desktop.
GNOME has more of a particular vision for the desktop, and I think Plasma unfortunately gets sold as 'more or less like Windows!' because the defaults put the taskbar on the bottom and there's a button resembling the Windows Start Menu.
This is completely tangential and a purely anecdotal observation but I find it interesting that big movements in the "year of the linux desktop" usually come in some very specific use case like ChromeOS or SteamOS.
I'm glad you said it, I think it's really important, especially for those of us who really like Linux.
It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly.
It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years of many Linux Desktops."
ChromeOS is hard to celebrate though. While it is essentially free software and based on free software, it puts computing of its users in Google's cloud. That's a big loss of control and a huge privacy concern.
Free software is important to me because it is supposed to enable users to take back control of their computing.
In practice, I literally just got a Chromebook for my daughter and I'm happy to report that Crostini is fine, and I'd venture to say that "a major OS with strong Native Linux Support built in" might even be more valuable than "abstaining" and fully sticking with pure "Free Software."
(For the record, I'm a huge fan of Stallman et al and I want people like him to keep doing what they do -- I just think that Stallman's value isn't in everyone doing exactly what Stallman says, more like looking at him as a platonic ideal that we should try for, but realistically will never reach.)
Crostini is a good thing but it is not the way most people will use a Chromebook which is still pretty much centered around Chrome.
Like WSL is not something most people will use on Windows.
My concern here is a bit about non-free software, but mostly not: I'd not be very happy with a purely free software version of ChromeOS (which maybe ChromiumOS is by the way).
because the biggest issue for linux is that it's not the default on end user devices. Barely anyone is ever going to (re)install an operating system so large companies shipping linux is a big deal.
How durable are the gaming controllers and keys on the Steam Deck? Are they repairable/swappable?
I'm usually fairly heavy on gamepads and broke a few of them already, so I'm not that comfortable buying something that I could easily damage.
It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you, it's there to help you!
As for library support, I looked into it but the only real options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use some high level abstraction (Python).
I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out of necessity.
My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad, because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight.
Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style.
Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse. I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.
> The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style.
Now that I'm actually using Windows again on a regular basis, it really baffles me that people say this. Like, turn dark mode on and have fun getting blinded when random parts of the builtin Settings app are actually links to Control Panel, which just doesn't support dark mode at all and uses totally different widgets. Or try to fight a headache when some Java app has really blurry font rendering for some reason, even though the toolkit looks semi-native for Windows apps from 10 years ago. And have fun with all the Electron apps that completely ignore the native look and feel.
There is no OS where all apps have visual consistency. Idk why people pretend this is uniquely a freedesktop problem.
It's far from uniquely a freedesktop problem. There's one platform I know of whose applications, with the exception of Electron junk, mostly follows system design guidelines and that's macOS. It's far from perfect, but it's the best out there at the moment. Windows used to have about the same level of consistency in the Vista and 7 age. I think Microsoft has ruined their design uniformity the day Windows 8 came out. Windows 8.1, then 10, then 10 again, and now 11, all added their own little inconsistencies to a system that hadn't been fully ported to the new UI yet.
However, in my opinion the inconsistencies are rarely ever by design, except for Electron/Tauri/etc. applications because web developers consider themselves above concepts like "consistency" and "using system standards". The move from native to specialised, slightly outdated browsers has been a regression in usability in many aspects and the proposed solutions seem to be to switch to a dedicated, up to date browser rather than to look for consistency. I usually run most Electron apps in my browser instead because the "native" part of the application never seems to add anything, really, though sometimes developers don't port features to the web version.
Qt can copy the native look and feel quite easily but GNOME chooses not to expose a usable native look and feel unless you port the entire thing over to GTK+. In return, GTK+ doesn't even try to come close to a native look and feel.
If Qt and Wine applications don't look entirely native, that's because of technical challenges or a lack of free time to invest in platform behaviour. In these opinionated desktop environments and SDKs, the problem is actually a conscious choice: "our system looks better than your so suck it" rather than "we don't have time to make our UI look perfect on your system".
When developers choose frameworks that don't look consistent that's either because of cost effectiveness, lack of knowledge of native languages, or sometimes simple laziness. Those reasons can be annoying but they're understandable. The real problem lies with the platforms themselves for not exposing easy methods to gain consistency. That's why I blame Electron more than Spotify or Slack, and why I have such a dislike of Java's GUI libraries, GTK+, and GNOME.
GTK+ apps usually look okay on Plasma, at least for GTK3. The only one I routinely run these days is Firefox.
Did they break the integration approach the KDE folks use for getting GTK+ apps to look good with GTK4? I know there were other changes to how theming works that caused some controversy.
It's nice and were I to use a standard desktop environment I'd be all over it, but I'm too attached to tiling WMs and bismuth doesn't quite cut it compared to i3/sway.
As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the settings app
Ah, OK, fair enough. Sorry. That was not clear to me, but then again, I do not routinely use KDE. I liked KDE 1.x but for me each successive version adds bloat I don't want.
No, I daresay it doesn't work as well as a dedicated tiling WM, but I don't use tiling WMs. :-) I have used xNix environments with just a window manager in the past, and while it works, I am not someone who lives in a terminal. In fact I almost never use them, just for occasional admin stuff, like a morning update run. Apart from that, I barely touch them.
So for me, I like the comforts of a desktop, and I don't want to give that up. But I do like tiled windows sometimes, so something that gives me a bit of both is of potential interest, while a pure-play tiling WM isn't.
For me it's so much better than gnome. Much more intuitive, much more configurable (which I really care about). I generally like Qt apps much more than GTK equivalents too so that works out well. I only have a few GTK apps in my workflow.
Mature? I don't know about that. Each time I upgrade I'm faced with new inexplicable bugs. This time on 5.25.0, I'm hit by:
Brightness controls are broken, both from the keyboard keys and plasma applet thing. echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness still works fine at least...
I can't drag windows between different virtual desktops from the desktop grid. Trying to drag one window drags all on that desktop and swaps them with the target desktop.
Not introduced with this update but still broken: Every time I unplug and replug in my USB mouse, my inverse scroll direction preference isn't respected. I have to go into the mouse config GUI, uncheck it, apply, recheck it, and apply. Every time I plug in my mouse. Never in my 30 years of using computers have I see such basic functionality broken this badly. How how HOW does KDE not get a mouse configuration GUI to work correctly? Such basic functionality getting broken has seriously shaken my confidence in KDE as a whole. I just don't understand how something so basic and conceptually simple could break, let alone remain broken for so long.
Other issues I've experienced in the past few months that have now seemingly resolved: Symlinks to files on my network share wouldn't thumbnail in the Folder View applet, but would in Dolphin. Power management (plugged in, unplugged, battery low, etc) notifications stopped working.
> And yet, people don't care about it.
I care, trust me. I really want to like KDE. But when each update inexplicably breaks basic functionality, how can I recommend this to any of my friends or family? I think they'd hate me for the recommendation.
Who the hell decided that windows no longer need a border? Clearly someone who never has overlapping windows open at the same time. It's a horror-show of trying to visually figure out where one window ends and the one beneath it begins because, well... white backgrounds look just the same as other white backgrounds. Please, for the love of everyone's bleeding eyes, put the border decorations back. (If I could find out where to change the styling myself it would be done already. But I can't and defaults matter!)
Borders on Windows 10 are ~1px wide and last time I looked they couldn't be tweaked to be thicker. There is a drop-shadow too, but that has hardly if any effect for white-on-black terminal windows.
You're right, defaults matter, but I tend to think these are fine. The windows have shadows, which allows telling them apart just as well (or better) than flat borders, imo.
Lattedock is the best dock for any desktop environment I've used (including Windows/StarDock, MacOS/built-in, and Gnome/Dash-to-Dock). Install Latte, run Latte, and finally delete the bottom panel. It takes less than a minute to change it.
It's more of a Windows 10 look. Gnome has a toolbar at the top giving it somewhat of a macOS feel (which I guess is why some skin it to death with macOS like widgets)
Yeah, KDE has always felt more Microsofty while GNOME has felt more Apple-adjacent.
GNOME 2.x kind of reminds me of Classic Mac OS with a taskbar duct taped on while GNOME 3.x+ is kind of like what you’d get if you tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS.
Nothing in the open desktop world really mirrors Aqua-era OS X or modern macOS which is a bit weird to me. ElementaryOS aesthetically reminds me of OS X 10.9, but doesn’t operate like it at all in practice, instead also feeling kind of iPad-ish like GNOME does.
GNOME 3 took most of the parts of Aqua that I liked and removed the ugly "lickability" from it to seem more professional. It was good (and controversial), but eventually they threw all that work away to Big Sur-ify their desktop.
Latte dock can give you a dock pretty similar to macOS. There are also widgets that let you build a global menu bar, and libraries which allow most apps with a menu bar to export it to the global one.
I've done a lot of experimenting though and never gotten it in a state that feels as polished as macOS.
I use plasma on debian current stable 10+ hours a day. It works really well except for a few bugs sometimes (diasppearing window decoration after using firefox).
As a user, I like Plasma a lot but what I'd love is even more bug fixes. It's not that bugs are there by the dozen, I hardly encounter one, but I have a global feeling that little details here and there could be improved.
How is Plasma in terms of CPU, memory, and graphics load? When I switched from Mac OS X to Linux six years ago I tried Ubuntu but I found Gnome to be incredibly slow and resource intense. Then I tried Xubuntu and I've used it ever since. I'm pretty happy running XFCE on two 4K screens with my desktop and on my hidpi Lenovo laptop. I've noticed Plasma continuing to improve and people recommending it so now I'm more keen to test it out.
Besides the improved UX are there any other advantages of Plasma over XFCE?
Honestly, At this point, KDE is just as light as XFCE and Gnome is pretty low too. From my testing, minimal KDE on Arch or Gentoo install pulls it ~450-500mb at boot, Manjaro and Suse around 550-600mb.
Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).
> Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment
Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].
Ugh. I enjoy the GNOME look and feel but every thread on their big tracker makes me want to switch desktop environments. "Your standard is irrelevant because we don't want to follow it" is something I'd sooner expect from Microsoft than from an open source collective.
The window decorations stuff drives me batty. Titlebar and buttons aside, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding about window shadows. There is some vague effort afoot[1], but a surprising number of developers don't really care whether they're consistent (note, nobody even mentions shadows in that extremely long gitlab issue you linked to), despite the Gtk folks going to tremendous efforts to make them look nice for their specific toolkit. Which is great, until you have a Gtk 3 app beside a Gtk 4 app and it looks like they're each being affected by a different light source, begging the question: why do we even have them? Shadows are supposed to create a consistent sense of space and guide the eye around the desktop, but if they're all different, that isn't happening. They're just noise.
To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.
No way,
From my personal experience on my machine with 6gb ddr3, 5400rpm disk, i5 3rd gen KDE is so annoying to use and even multitasking is laggy while on xfce it's very smooth relatively.
This was observed on Ubuntu, Arch and opensuse. Opensuse KDE was the worst of them all while arch with Xfce ran the fastest of them all.
Sounds like a configuration issue somewhere. I've run KDE on several computers with no lags, and I am quite sensitive to lags.
I also run KDE on an under-powered (even at the time it was released) x86 tablet released in 2011 (the Airis Kira Slimpad - Intel Atom N450 1,66 GHz, 1 GB RAM DDR2 @ 800Mhz, Intel GMA 500). It was the only desktop environment that was kinda usable on a tablet at the time. It's slow (this tablet is exclusively used to play music by auto starting Clementine), but not slower than anything else.
A 5400rpm disk is tough though with today's distributions and maybe Xfce does fewer disc accesses than KDE. You probably should disable desktop search if you haven't.
I guess it's the hdd thats causing the problems. I guess your tablet has emmc flash storage causing it to be pretty responsive compared to my machine that's better spec and newer too........
I think your issue is the 5400rpm disk. KDE uses a lot more of dynamic libraries (for various plugins) compared to xfce. On hard drives, that means a lot of random disk accesses, which tends to slow down startup speeds a lot.
Plasma (KDE) is generally lighter than XFCE these days. Highly dependent on how you customise each one of course.
IIRC there was a thread a while ago with benchmarks. And an XFCE developer confirmed that this doesn't surprise them, because KDE have a lot more dev resources to spend on optimisation than they do.
I run what I would consider a pretty heavy Plasma desktop, with latte dock, all the fancy compositing effects, and a few other additions. On top of that, I'm running several Electron apps, one Windows app in Wine, and Firefox with several tabs right now. My memory usage is 3.5GB.
I have been dealing with frame drops and not-so-smooth video since I updated the NVIDIA driver to version 515 on my Pop_OS! install on Thinkpad Extreme Gen 2 (last "good" version was 460). I thought of trying another DE to see if that makes any difference and with KDE, even though the graphics issues are somewhat still there, the performance is a definite improvement. I thought of trying KDE because I heard all good things about it and it has indeed been a joy to use. Now if only NVIDIA had the ability to produce some decent drivers for Linux...
Replying to myself in case any poor soul suffering from the same issue sees this. I generated /etc/X11/xorg.conf using "nvidia-xconfig" (it directly writes to this location so backup your existing conf in that location, if it already exists). Then I added the "ForceCompositionPipeline" option to the section for nvidia:
Other suggest that it uses same or even less memory than Xfce, that may be true on fresh boot, but it's misleading, because Plasma utilizes lazy load aggressively and also still leaks memory like crazy.
I tried to use it for a while and I noticed that memory grows quite a bit after using it for a whole day for example. I witnessed once plasma-shell process using 600MB and kwin 300MB, which is quite bad, worse than even GNOME. You can restart processes and it returns to normal, but I don't want to do that, I want DE using reasonable resources, not 1GB for showing wallpaper and few windows
To be fair, a DE does quote a bit more than just "showing wallpaper and few windows". If that's your only use, switch to something like Window Maker or maybe something even more sparse.
Regarding GNOME, that is what happens when most of UI stuff is running on JavaScript.
I also moved into XFCE.
KDE has the advantage of a full desktop experience, where all applications targeted to KDE can share the same developer stack and made to interoperate between each other, beyond classical UNIX IPC mechanisms.
GNOME had this as well, but seems to have been lost on their minimalism quest.
I recently switched from Ubuntu to Arch with Plasma, and this is the first time I've been truly happy with a KDE desktop. It all works, it's snappy on my 8th gen intel system with AMD graphics, I've been able to tweak anything I wanted to tweak, hidpi looks good, and now there's a new release and it's looking even better.
I’ve used KDE and Arch for the last three years and it’s been great and pain-free. I got a new Thinkpad last week and used the archinstall installer, and was up and going in 15 minutes. Very smooth.
KDE devs are regularly in the kde subreddit and they seem nice and approachable.
Same, except OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. First time using any SUSE distro for over 15 years, and it's really nice. I don't really want to tweak everything, and Tumbleweed has a nice UI to quickly switch between DE lookalikes (like, click this one too get top menu, bottom dock)
I don't understand why they still haven't changed their ugly black flat icons, they are just horrendous. And the default fonts on KDE have always been bad too. I feel that with just a couple of tweaks it could be much much more pleasant.
Do you mean the little icons they use on eg Dolphin's "Places" panel? I agree they are not great. Does anyone know how to change them?
I've been trying to use Nemo as my default file manager in Fedora KDE, but something broke where I can't actually launch anything from Nemo most of the time, so I'll probably go back to Dolphin.
Hey ropeladder, sorry for the plug comment. Saw your comment in the Kinesis Advantage topic about your trigger finger condition and would like to know how it evolved.
If possible, could you contact me through jpcrs at pm.me? Cheers
Does Plasma even have default fonts? IIRC it just uses whatever your system's default Serif and Sans-Serif fonts are, default config doesn't even refer to any specific fonts by name.
Brilliant! Now all we need is reliable WiFi, Bluetooth, CPU power management, wake from sleep, screen scaling, and audio and we'll be ready for Linux on the desktop! /s
Less sarcastically though, I found plasma to be the most usable of the bunch and glad to see the release cadence continuing. Gnome et al feel like they are on a relentless march to replicate Mac OS as closely as possible. I find Mac OS's approach to multitasking actively user-hostile, so something same like plasma is welcome.
Ironically I migrated to Mac OS because hardware support in Linux on common dell hardware is just not there, even in the 2020s
I've just came back to Linux, with Plasma nonetheless, and the only problem I had from this list was that sleep was consuming a lot of battery. Besides that, everything worked fine. It's good enough :)
This is how Macs sleep, and it's really good. The same behavior got rolled into systemd as a ready-made, shipped-by-default option a year or two ago, but you may still gave to turn it on depending on your distro. It's definitely worth it.
If sleep is consuming a lot of battery it's more of a hardware/firmware problem. Because during sleep at (at least the sleep states that Linux supports!) nothing is actively running, only the memory contents are preserved.
What could also be is that it's not actually sleeping.
Have used multiple monitors with latest KDE, and never had an issue with display scaling - both fonts and icons look good, whereas in MacOS fonts are just terrible on external displays, so far tried 23" 1080p, 27" 1440p and 34" ultrawide 1440p with the same result.
And KDE also allows changing external display scale, where MacOS only offer setting lower resolution, seriously, wtf?
That's a pity that in year 2022 apple sells notebook with only 16GB of RAM for $2000 and there is still no adequate alternative for the macbooks in terms of hardware, battery life and driver support.
MacOS feels so limited compared to KDE, even base functionality like alt+tab that shows windows previews(and not icons), or window arrangment with keyboards shortcuts or by dragging to the display corners, is not possible without 3rd party software.
Honestly that is one of the main reasons I use it. Years back, I realized no matter how much I customized or tweaked my OS I was never satisfied. Might as well not be satisfied and not tempted to waste time tweaking. But, like anything, you grow used to what’s comfortable, so now I just prefer it. It just works.
What I hated about macOS was that things were constantly changed from under me for what I considered bad reasons (often marketing or change for the sake of change), and generally made things worse.
For example when they changed the virtual desktops to be no longer in a grid but in a row. That broke a lot of how I like to do things. In general a lot of changes in every release felt like regressions and many new features were unusable because I'm not exclusively on the Apple ecosystem.. So many of their smart stuff just won't work for me. Anything involving iCloud for example.
I'm really happy to have control back over my desktop with KDE. And it does satisfy me to adjust it to my preferences. But preferences vary of course!
> For me that is another reason it works well for me, I’m all apple and I am definitely dependent on that ecosystem for my sanity.
Yes and that's Apple's goal of course, they are a hardware company. They want to sell as much as hardware as possible so they have no incentive to make things cross-platform.
I really lamented this while watching the keynotes. New features in Messages, things like iCloud keychain. Cool, but if I can't access it in Linux, Android or Windows, what's the point? Also, almost none of my contacts are on Apple's ecosystem and this means that any collaborative / messaging functions are also irrelevant. Here in Europe nobody uses iMessage.
In the end with every new release I could strike out most of the new features due to being not applicable and I was left with changes that I hated, very often changes to existing features meant to accommodate new ones. For example the way the new virtual desktops work was meant to accommodate the new full screen and split screen modes.
Another thing that bothered me is the way Apple pushes battery life. On my work Mac Mini I have set it to never sleep but still when I haven't used it for a few hours and go back to it, I can see everything playing "catch up" and being slow for the first few minutes. I think they call it "App Nap". For some apps I don't care but for others like Outlook (Apple mail is not allowed for work) I want them to be always be up to date. Apple make it very hard to turn this off. I'm sure they do this because they want to advertise huge battery lifetimes. But battery life is a non-issue on a Mac Mini. Energy saving is a bit of a thing but I'm willing to spend that little bit of power (because really it's not a lot) to have a responsive system when I go back to it.
It was stuff like this that bothered me more and more. Apple decides and you just have to go with it. One size does not fit me.
> Hope your control gets you to that nirvana I could never achieve. I’ll be envious.
It did already. It's not perfect but I don't strive for that. But my annoyance is much less than on Apple. I'm much happier with it. Part of it is that I don't expect or even want everything to 'just work'. I have no problem doing stuff in the terminal and in fact I prefer doing certain tasks there. Like bulk renaming files for example.
I don't miss much about macOS as a platform (and I still use it for work by the way). But I do miss some apps like Pixelmator. Gimp is definitely less good in my opinion. In particular I miss the ability to add simple shapes. But I still have to check out some KDE specific apps like Krita.
When is this out? It mentions a sneak peek so I assume it isn't already.
Overall the changes sound nice. I hope they'll keep the other window overview options though. I like the grid view in particular, because I use a 3x3 desktop grid (and I use the numpad as a quick switch for this)
This is exciting. It seems like they're making another big push towards usability (I'm especially excited about the real, i.e. finger-following gestures).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadIt is complete, mature and works out-of-the-box.
For users it has sane defaults but provides virtually endless customization and contrary to other desktop environments, user customization is encourage.
For developers, it provides solid libraries to build upon, not like other libraries that are constantly changing and making developers' life harder.
And yet, people don't care about it.
Took a many years of me interface hopping around, but I'm back at kde. I was using mate, but I'm back at kde on arch.
KDE is pretty great, though.
Once a long time ago there was also the licensing concern with Qt.
I'm sure it got a lot better, and people have even described Plasma 5.x as light weight. The times I tried it later, I liked it, but for the time being the Linux desktop has lost me and I'm using Mac :-)
That being said, I did recently try KDE5 for the first time in ages about a year ago, and it is now (again) my favorite desktop environment.
The KDE devs are the ones who decided to call the alpha version 4.0 so I wouldn't put all the blame on the distros here.
I think the problem with KDE 4 was not just but also experimental technologies like Nepomuk (desktop search is great in theory, but an EU research project is probably not the best fit for a production DE), Akonadi (yay let's run a MySQL server on each desktop), Plasma widgets (if you thought one widget set was enough for a DE you thought wrong apparently) and Activities that just didn't provide enough value for the overhead and change that they forced onto the whole system. A more straightforward Qt4 upgrade of KDE 3 would not have been nearly as problematic.
They made a successful transition from KDE 4 to 5, and are committed to users needs, so we can expect a smoothly transition to Plasma 6.
Now, compare it to Gnome, where every release means deeply changes for both users and 3rd party developers, and Gnome developers simply don't care.
A lot of applications' first KDE4-based releases were missing features as well. I remember that my favorite app at the time, Amarok, took a long time to reach feature parity.
Eventually KDE4 did mature nicely, and the transition to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 was way, way, smoother. There were enough little quirks to notice the transition was happening, but you had more or less harmonious coexistence between KDE4-based apps and KF5-based apps as the developers of KDE apps each migrated theirs over as they saw fit. There was no big moment of widespread breakage or loss of functionality.
Afaict they're taking the same approach to rebasing things on Qt 6. To me it seems like the painful transition between KDE3 and KDE4 is something the developer community learned very well from, but I haven't followed along with any discussions which would really show whether that's the case.
KDE4-based Amarok was its own trainwreck. Released without support for dynamic playlists based on hard filters because FUZZY FILTERS ARE THE FUTURE. And it managed to trash its database twice on my system. It's the music player that made me stop using a dedicated music player program.
More or less the same for me. I loved Amarok until KDE4, but had to abandon it then. For a few years I used an XMMS2 client I wrote myself, but I grew weary of keeping that updated so I switched to VLC, and later mpv, with playlists loaded from my (custom, but general purpose) file manager.
Until Ubuntu switches to KDE, I am stuck in the Gnome-lets-remove-desktop-icons-because world.
Myself I'm running XUbuntu (XFCE) as my daily driver, works excellently and I have no issues doing what I need to do.
1. https://kubuntu.org/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu
Edit: OK, "officially blessed".
I found happiness in xfce4 (that beauty hasn't crashed even once in about 8 years of using it heavily), and then sway (same story, currently at two years).
Is the problem. Plasma has been my daily driver since 4.4, on Debian testing, on systems which I know beforehand wouldn't have any random issues (Debian-specific also).
Autohide panels is something Plasma seems to particularly struggle with. Sometimes the panel will start spazzing out, flickering and neither appearing nor disappearing, before finally crashing completely (and sometimes not coming back until I manually(!) restart plasma shell.)
I've switched from Gnome after 15 years to Plasma 5, and I've never been so happy.
Contrary to Gnome, Plasma is lightweight, works out of the box without 3rd party extensions, but yet 3rd party themes and extensions are 1st class citizens.
It’s gotten better over the years but still has a long way to go. Something that would help a lot is if KDE came prepackaged with a handful of different full configurations that could be easily flipped between to serve as starting points.
And in the thousand options to twiddle, there aren't the options I want.
I'd like a panel that when vertical did not scale the controls on it, just kept them the same size but rearranged them. I want a 4- or 5-column vertical panel with nothing growing or shrinking in size.
I'd like the Xfce option to constrain the Start button to a single line of text+label.
I'd like the Xfce option to set the size and font of the clock.
I rather liked wm2. I would like the option of window title bars on the left or right edge, or even the bottom. Why not?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Wm2.png
I liked BeOS' title bars as tabs, not whole width. Can I have those, please?
Then if I stack windows on top of one another, I would like to move the tabs so they don't overlap. Or better still, have them automatically rearrange themselves.
I hate the trend of having no menu bar, just a hamburger menu. Can I disable that globally, please? I want a menu bar in every app, enforced by the desktop. Currently some apps have it, some don't.
I do not want desktop gadgets or widgets or plasmoids or whatever they are called. Not at all, not ever. A tick box to disable them globally might be useful? Maybe integrate with Conky for a desktop status monitor.
I used to have a machine with 3 screens arranged in a line, with the bottom edges level. (Don't have space in the home office, sadly.) If I can't have a working vertical taskbar, can I have one taskbar across the bottom of 2 or 3 screens, please? KDE 3 could do that no problem.
It's the DE of the Steam Deck, for which was apparently 1.5 million units were already sold in May. That's certainly one of the most significant events for the Linux desktop.
If you search for videos and blog posts, Plasma is usually a second class citizen.
It's easy to split hairs over "true Linux" or whatnot, but I think it's far more valuable to celebrate wins like ChromeOS and SteamOS in the hopes of encouraging more of this. I think that's what gets us closer to the general ideas and ideals of "Linux" and or "Free Software" broadly.
It won't be "Year of the Linux Desktop," it will be "Years of many Linux Desktops."
Free software is important to me because it is supposed to enable users to take back control of their computing.
In practice, I literally just got a Chromebook for my daughter and I'm happy to report that Crostini is fine, and I'd venture to say that "a major OS with strong Native Linux Support built in" might even be more valuable than "abstaining" and fully sticking with pure "Free Software."
(For the record, I'm a huge fan of Stallman et al and I want people like him to keep doing what they do -- I just think that Stallman's value isn't in everyone doing exactly what Stallman says, more like looking at him as a platonic ideal that we should try for, but realistically will never reach.)
Like WSL is not something most people will use on Windows.
My concern here is a bit about non-free software, but mostly not: I'd not be very happy with a purely free software version of ChromeOS (which maybe ChromiumOS is by the way).
It works as you expect and you don't ever need to tweak it unless you're really into it, which makes it... boring. Boring is good. You don't want your desktop manager to distract you, it's there to help you!
As for library support, I looked into it but the only real options seem to be to write code in C++ (not a fan) or to use some high level abstraction (Python).
I like GTK for projects like gtk-rust. The relevant types and macros seem much better supported than any Qt binding I've seen so far, and the Qt ones often come with unsafe code blocks out of necessity.
My Rust GUI code will (sadly) be GTK based because of its decent support without too many hacks. That's quite sad, because GTK applications look very GNOME-like, even when running on Windows or macOS. An unfortunate result of their unwillingness to consider other options in the CSD/SSD fight.
Stupid stuff like the inability for applications to look native in any desktop environment is why I don't think we'll reach the year of the Linux desktop any time soon. The Linux desktop can't even run applications in a consistent style.
Any way, I hope KDE will in time grow more language diverse. I'd like to switch my code to a less opinionated code base.
Now that I'm actually using Windows again on a regular basis, it really baffles me that people say this. Like, turn dark mode on and have fun getting blinded when random parts of the builtin Settings app are actually links to Control Panel, which just doesn't support dark mode at all and uses totally different widgets. Or try to fight a headache when some Java app has really blurry font rendering for some reason, even though the toolkit looks semi-native for Windows apps from 10 years ago. And have fun with all the Electron apps that completely ignore the native look and feel.
There is no OS where all apps have visual consistency. Idk why people pretend this is uniquely a freedesktop problem.
However, in my opinion the inconsistencies are rarely ever by design, except for Electron/Tauri/etc. applications because web developers consider themselves above concepts like "consistency" and "using system standards". The move from native to specialised, slightly outdated browsers has been a regression in usability in many aspects and the proposed solutions seem to be to switch to a dedicated, up to date browser rather than to look for consistency. I usually run most Electron apps in my browser instead because the "native" part of the application never seems to add anything, really, though sometimes developers don't port features to the web version.
Qt can copy the native look and feel quite easily but GNOME chooses not to expose a usable native look and feel unless you port the entire thing over to GTK+. In return, GTK+ doesn't even try to come close to a native look and feel.
If Qt and Wine applications don't look entirely native, that's because of technical challenges or a lack of free time to invest in platform behaviour. In these opinionated desktop environments and SDKs, the problem is actually a conscious choice: "our system looks better than your so suck it" rather than "we don't have time to make our UI look perfect on your system".
When developers choose frameworks that don't look consistent that's either because of cost effectiveness, lack of knowledge of native languages, or sometimes simple laziness. Those reasons can be annoying but they're understandable. The real problem lies with the platforms themselves for not exposing easy methods to gain consistency. That's why I blame Electron more than Spotify or Slack, and why I have such a dislike of Java's GUI libraries, GTK+, and GNOME.
Did they break the integration approach the KDE folks use for getting GTK+ apps to look good with GTK4? I know there were other changes to how theming works that caused some controversy.
As a non default environment for most distros, I think this is the problem they face. Once you get into the people going into the customisation sphere, everyone has their own little dealbreakers like moving a window left repeatedly with keyboard hotkeys not wrapping into the next monitor, or the amount of spacing on titlebars or the way the dark theme handles the settings app
Why not make that an option in KDE?
It doesn't work as well as i3 or sway.
No, I daresay it doesn't work as well as a dedicated tiling WM, but I don't use tiling WMs. :-) I have used xNix environments with just a window manager in the past, and while it works, I am not someone who lives in a terminal. In fact I almost never use them, just for occasional admin stuff, like a morning update run. Apart from that, I barely touch them.
So for me, I like the comforts of a desktop, and I don't want to give that up. But I do like tiled windows sometimes, so something that gives me a bit of both is of potential interest, while a pure-play tiling WM isn't.
Brightness controls are broken, both from the keyboard keys and plasma applet thing. echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness still works fine at least...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454161
I can't drag windows between different virtual desktops from the desktop grid. Trying to drag one window drags all on that desktop and swaps them with the target desktop.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455268
Not introduced with this update but still broken: Every time I unplug and replug in my USB mouse, my inverse scroll direction preference isn't respected. I have to go into the mouse config GUI, uncheck it, apply, recheck it, and apply. Every time I plug in my mouse. Never in my 30 years of using computers have I see such basic functionality broken this badly. How how HOW does KDE not get a mouse configuration GUI to work correctly? Such basic functionality getting broken has seriously shaken my confidence in KDE as a whole. I just don't understand how something so basic and conceptually simple could break, let alone remain broken for so long.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435113
Other issues I've experienced in the past few months that have now seemingly resolved: Symlinks to files on my network share wouldn't thumbnail in the Folder View applet, but would in Dolphin. Power management (plugged in, unplugged, battery low, etc) notifications stopped working.
> And yet, people don't care about it.
I care, trust me. I really want to like KDE. But when each update inexplicably breaks basic functionality, how can I recommend this to any of my friends or family? I think they'd hate me for the recommendation.
See the "window border size" dropdown here https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/d/d2/SystemSettings...
I say again, though: Defaults matter!
GNOME 2.x kind of reminds me of Classic Mac OS with a taskbar duct taped on while GNOME 3.x+ is kind of like what you’d get if you tried to turn iPadOS into a desktop OS.
Nothing in the open desktop world really mirrors Aqua-era OS X or modern macOS which is a bit weird to me. ElementaryOS aesthetically reminds me of OS X 10.9, but doesn’t operate like it at all in practice, instead also feeling kind of iPad-ish like GNOME does.
- Copying something old is kind of embarrassing, especially if
- Seriously, macOS isn't/wasn't clearly superior at everyhing. For example, I think the dock is a rather terrible idea.
But going with the Windows look by default is a good idea because, in terms of pure market share, that's what users expect.
[1] https://github.com/KDE/latte-dock
I've done a lot of experimenting though and never gotten it in a state that feels as polished as macOS.
As a user, I like Plasma a lot but what I'd love is even more bug fixes. It's not that bugs are there by the dozen, I hardly encounter one, but I have a global feeling that little details here and there could be improved.
Anyway, thx KDE for Plasma, it just rocks !
Besides the improved UX are there any other advantages of Plasma over XFCE?
Fresh Gnome on Arch or Gentoo I've seen ~650 at boot and around 750 with Ubuntu, around 650-700 with Fedora.
Gnome's Wayland implementation is much better then KDE at this moment, but KDE is quickly catching up. Nvidia still lacks, even with their EGL support. I use a Nvidia 1060 6gb on an updated (KDE 5.24), but several year old Manjaro KDE install with XOrg as a daily driver, and it's very smooth for me. Games work great. Maybe some occasional stuttering on my monitors that are 144 and 60hz (xorg limitation).
Gnome's gestures and by far and away better then KDE's too (at least as of 5.24, but 5.25 adds many more).
Agreed, with a caveat— Gnome's Mutter compositor for Wayland has bugs. It does not support server side rendered window decorations while KDE does. This means that the title bars for Alacritty[0] terminal emulator and the mpv[1] video player are ugly and not so functional. This is an intentional decision by the GNOME team[2]. Also the screen locks while watching videos on mpv because Mutter does not support the idle-inhibit protocol, although work is currently being done on this[3].
[0]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5956
[1]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/pull/7186
[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111
To be fair, it's difficult because Wayland clients might have rounded corners and other odd shapes, and I'm not in a position to really look into it myself so I shouldn't complain, but argh, the indifference about it is frustrating.
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1517
I also run KDE on an under-powered (even at the time it was released) x86 tablet released in 2011 (the Airis Kira Slimpad - Intel Atom N450 1,66 GHz, 1 GB RAM DDR2 @ 800Mhz, Intel GMA 500). It was the only desktop environment that was kinda usable on a tablet at the time. It's slow (this tablet is exclusively used to play music by auto starting Clementine), but not slower than anything else.
A 5400rpm disk is tough though with today's distributions and maybe Xfce does fewer disc accesses than KDE. You probably should disable desktop search if you haven't.
IIRC there was a thread a while ago with benchmarks. And an XFCE developer confirmed that this doesn't surprise them, because KDE have a lot more dev resources to spend on optimisation than they do.
Other suggest that it uses same or even less memory than Xfce, that may be true on fresh boot, but it's misleading, because Plasma utilizes lazy load aggressively and also still leaks memory like crazy.
I tried to use it for a while and I noticed that memory grows quite a bit after using it for a whole day for example. I witnessed once plasma-shell process using 600MB and kwin 300MB, which is quite bad, worse than even GNOME. You can restart processes and it returns to normal, but I don't want to do that, I want DE using reasonable resources, not 1GB for showing wallpaper and few windows
I also moved into XFCE.
KDE has the advantage of a full desktop experience, where all applications targeted to KDE can share the same developer stack and made to interoperate between each other, beyond classical UNIX IPC mechanisms.
GNOME had this as well, but seems to have been lost on their minimalism quest.
KDE devs are regularly in the kde subreddit and they seem nice and approachable.
I'm glad we are back in a good place with KDE 5, but it felt like it took way too long.
I've been trying to use Nemo as my default file manager in Fedora KDE, but something broke where I can't actually launch anything from Nemo most of the time, so I'll probably go back to Dolphin.
If possible, could you contact me through jpcrs at pm.me? Cheers
Less sarcastically though, I found plasma to be the most usable of the bunch and glad to see the release cadence continuing. Gnome et al feel like they are on a relentless march to replicate Mac OS as closely as possible. I find Mac OS's approach to multitasking actively user-hostile, so something same like plasma is welcome.
Ironically I migrated to Mac OS because hardware support in Linux on common dell hardware is just not there, even in the 2020s
What could also be is that it's not actually sleeping.
That's a pity that in year 2022 apple sells notebook with only 16GB of RAM for $2000 and there is still no adequate alternative for the macbooks in terms of hardware, battery life and driver support.
MacOS feels so limited compared to KDE, even base functionality like alt+tab that shows windows previews(and not icons), or window arrangment with keyboards shortcuts or by dragging to the display corners, is not possible without 3rd party software.
Honestly that is one of the main reasons I use it. Years back, I realized no matter how much I customized or tweaked my OS I was never satisfied. Might as well not be satisfied and not tempted to waste time tweaking. But, like anything, you grow used to what’s comfortable, so now I just prefer it. It just works.
For example when they changed the virtual desktops to be no longer in a grid but in a row. That broke a lot of how I like to do things. In general a lot of changes in every release felt like regressions and many new features were unusable because I'm not exclusively on the Apple ecosystem.. So many of their smart stuff just won't work for me. Anything involving iCloud for example.
I'm really happy to have control back over my desktop with KDE. And it does satisfy me to adjust it to my preferences. But preferences vary of course!
For me that is another reason it works well for me, I’m all apple and I am definitely dependent on that ecosystem for my sanity.
Hope your control gets you to that nirvana I could never achieve. I’ll be envious.
Yes and that's Apple's goal of course, they are a hardware company. They want to sell as much as hardware as possible so they have no incentive to make things cross-platform.
I really lamented this while watching the keynotes. New features in Messages, things like iCloud keychain. Cool, but if I can't access it in Linux, Android or Windows, what's the point? Also, almost none of my contacts are on Apple's ecosystem and this means that any collaborative / messaging functions are also irrelevant. Here in Europe nobody uses iMessage.
In the end with every new release I could strike out most of the new features due to being not applicable and I was left with changes that I hated, very often changes to existing features meant to accommodate new ones. For example the way the new virtual desktops work was meant to accommodate the new full screen and split screen modes.
Another thing that bothered me is the way Apple pushes battery life. On my work Mac Mini I have set it to never sleep but still when I haven't used it for a few hours and go back to it, I can see everything playing "catch up" and being slow for the first few minutes. I think they call it "App Nap". For some apps I don't care but for others like Outlook (Apple mail is not allowed for work) I want them to be always be up to date. Apple make it very hard to turn this off. I'm sure they do this because they want to advertise huge battery lifetimes. But battery life is a non-issue on a Mac Mini. Energy saving is a bit of a thing but I'm willing to spend that little bit of power (because really it's not a lot) to have a responsive system when I go back to it.
It was stuff like this that bothered me more and more. Apple decides and you just have to go with it. One size does not fit me.
> Hope your control gets you to that nirvana I could never achieve. I’ll be envious.
It did already. It's not perfect but I don't strive for that. But my annoyance is much less than on Apple. I'm much happier with it. Part of it is that I don't expect or even want everything to 'just work'. I have no problem doing stuff in the terminal and in fact I prefer doing certain tasks there. Like bulk renaming files for example.
I don't miss much about macOS as a platform (and I still use it for work by the way). But I do miss some apps like Pixelmator. Gimp is definitely less good in my opinion. In particular I miss the ability to add simple shapes. But I still have to check out some KDE specific apps like Krita.
This is on FreeBSD no less. Wayland support is currently broken for KDE on FreeBSD but X11 is fine for now.
Nowadays I can't stand an environment without the sane defaults and powerful customization capabilities we can find in Plasma/KDE.
A big "thank you" to all KDE contributors.
Overall the changes sound nice. I hope they'll keep the other window overview options though. I like the grid view in particular, because I use a 3x3 desktop grid (and I use the numpad as a quick switch for this)
You need to manually install `dkms` and `virtualbox-guest-x11` and then you can enable VBox' hardware acceleration and try it.
The floating taskbar is quite fun. Reminds me of Deepin. :-)